/[gxemul]/trunk/RELEASE

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-revision 20 by dpavlin,
Mon Oct  8 16:19:23 2007 UTC
+revision 32 by dpavlin,
Mon Oct  8 16:20:58 2007 UTC
 Line 1
- Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.3.7
+ Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.3
  ================================================================
- Copyright (C) 2003-2005  Anders Gavare.
+ Copyright (C) 2003-2006  Anders Gavare.
  GXemul is an experimental instruction-level machine emulator. Several
 Line 9 
 emulation modes are available. In some m
  hardware components are emulated well enough to let unmodified operating
  systems (e.g. NetBSD) run as if they were running on a real machine.
- MIPS processors are emulated using either a simple binary translation
+ The documentation lists the machines and guest operating systems that can
- layer ("recompilation"), which is used on Alpha and i386 hosts, or by
+ be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best working guest operating
- traditional interpretation (very very slow, but works on any host platform).
+ systems are probably NetBSD/pmax, NetBSD/cats, and OpenBSD/cats.
- ARM and PowerPC processors are emulated using a newer dynamic translation
- system. Performance is somewhere between traditional interpretation and
- dynamic recompilation; however, the dynamic translation system used in
- GXemul does NOT require platform-specific back-end code. In plain English,
- this means that the dyntrans system works on any host platform.
- I have verified that the following "guest" operating systems can run inside
- the emulator. Instructions on how to install and run these can be found in
- the documentation.
-     Guest operating system             Emulated machine
-     ----------------------             ----------------
-     NetBSD/pmax 2.1 (and 1.6.2)        DECstation 5000/200
-     OpenBSD/pmax 2.8-BETA              DECstation 5000/200
-     Ultrix 4.2-4.5                     DECstation 5000/200
-     Sprite demo harddisk image         DECstation 5000/200
-     Debian GNU/Linux for DECstation    DECstation 5000/200
-     Redhat Linux 7.1 for mips          DECstation 5000/200
-     NetBSD/arc 1.6.2                   Acer PICA-61
-     OpenBSD/arc 2.3                    Acer PICA-61
-     NetBSD/hpcmips 2.1                 NEC MobilePro 770, 780, 800, 880
-     NetBSD/cobalt 2.1                  Cobalt
-     NetBSD/evbmips 2.1                 Malta 5Kc/4Kc evaluation board
-     NetBSD/sgimips 2.1                 SGI O2 ("IP32")
-     NetBSD/cats 2.1                    CATS (ARM)
-     OpenBSD/cats 3.8                   CATS (ARM)
-     NetBSD/prep 2.1                    PReP (PowerPC Reference Platform)
- Some of these guest operating systems are easier to install and run than
- others. The best supported guest operating systems are probably NetBSD/pmax,
- NetBSD/cats and OpenBSD/cats.
- The emulator can also be used in other experiments; it does not have to run
- entire guest operating systems. However, as GXemul is an instruction-level
- emulator, it does not simulate things smaller than an instruction. What this
- means is that pipe-line stalls, penalties caused by branch-prediction misses
- or cache misses, and other micro-architectural effects are not simulated.
- User-visible change between release 0.3.6.2 and 0.3.7 include:
-     o)  The experimental PowerPC emulation mode is now working well enough
-         to allow NetBSD/prep 2.1 to be installed and run inside the emulator.
-         It is not 100% stable, and it is not optimized for performance yet,
-         but hopefully enough for simple experiments.
-     o)  I finally took the time to implement a DEC 21143 NIC; this brings
-         network connectivity to NetBSD/cats. (The userland "NAT"-like
-         networking layer is still a bit buggy, and does not work with
-         everything. However, NetBSD/cats can now be installed via ftp.)
-     o)  CD-ROM images can now in some cases be detected as ATAPI CD-ROMs
-         instead of IDE harddisks. It works for at least NetBSD, OpenBSD,
-         and Linux on CATS, and NetBSD on hpcmips.
- Internal (code related) changes include:
-     o)  Cleanup of the PCI and ISA bus frameworks; in practice this means
-         that more code can be shared between different emulated machine
-         models than before, and that adding new machine types will become
-         easier.
-     o)  Dyntrans updates; 32-bit PowerPC mostly, but also many performance
-         related updates for ARM.
- There have also been lots of other changes, too many and small to mention here.
+ Changes between release 0.4.2 and 0.4.3 include, among other things:
+     o)  SuperH (SH4) emulation is now stable enough to let a NetBSD/dreamcast
+         GENERIC_MD (ramdisk) kernel reach userland.
+     o)  There is now a simple framework for letting emulated clocks, as seen
+         by guest operating systems, run at the same speed as the host clock.
+         So far, the DECstation, MobilePro (hpcmips), NetWinder, CATS, Malta
+         (evbmips), Cobalt, Algor, Dreamcast, and testmips machine modes
+         use the new clock/timer framework.
+     o)  Some changes to the way expressions are evaluated in the built-in
+         debugger, and some changes in command behaviour:
+           x)  Expressions (including assignments) can now be arbitrarily
+               complex, using parentheses, and the following operators:
+                   + - * /    % (modulo)  ^ (xor)  & (and)  | (or)
+           x)  Some internal emulator variables can now be read/written using
+               normal expressions. Examples of commands that did not work
+               earlier, but should work now:
+                   print verbose
+                   r5 = sp - arch_pagesize * 4
+                   machine[0].statistics_enabled = 1
+           x)  To force a name to be interpreted as a setting/register name,
+               a hash sign (#) is now used instead of the percentage sign (%).
+               (In the new expression evaluator, % means arithmetic modulo.)
+           x)  The 'focus' command now also selects a cpu, in addition to
+               selecting machine and emul.
+           x)  The 'reg' command only prints registers for one cpu now, not
+               all cpus in the currently focused machine.
+     o)  The wdc (standard IDE controller) had a bug which prevented disk
+         images larger than 2 GB to work correctly. This has been fixed.
+     o)  For MIPS emulation, some combinations of emulated processor + guest
+         operating system should now work better when idling (i.e. the host
+         should not run at 100% CPU):
+           x)  For MIPS32/MIPS64 and RM5200, the 'wait' instruction should
+               now work more or less as expected.
+           x)  For VR41xx (e.g. MobilePro) emulation, the standby instruction
+               should work like the 'wait' instruction.
+           x)  For R3000 emulation, where there is no hardware wait instruction,
+               I've implemented "instruction combination" hacks for both
+               NetBSD/pmax and Debian/pmax, so that their cpu idle loops are
+               detected and treated almost as a wait instruction.
+     o)  MIPS 64-bit address translation (X=1) was not fully working before;
+         TLB exception handling for xkseg and larger-than-2GB-userland should
+         now actually work. (Thanks to Juli Mallett and Carl van Schaik for
+         noticing these problems.)
+     o)  The mouse cursor update routines in DECstation (LK201) emulation
+         previously used the fact that guest OSes set the _hardware_
+         cursor position. In order to support X Windows when emulating
+         modern versions of NetBSD/pmax, which don't set the hardware
+         position anymore, a workaround has been implemented which only
+         sends relative coordinates to the guest OS. This has two drawbacks:
+. Ultrix emulation with dual- and tripple-head emulation will
+            most likely feel very strange. It will still work, though.
+. Cursor movement feels "accelerated", because the emulator
+            sends unaccelerated movements to the guest OS, which then
+            accelerates them. This can however be compensated to some
+            degree by running 'xset m 1 0' in the guest OS.
+         Having weird accelerated mouse movement is better than having no
+         mouse support at all, so this change was necessary.
+ Please read the HISTORY files for more details.
  Files included in this release are:
-   BUGS                        A list of known bugs.
    HISTORY                     Detailed revision history / changelog.
    LICENSE                     Copyright message / license.
    README                      Quick start instructions, for the impatient.
    RELEASE                     This file.
    TODO                        TODO notes.
    configure, Makefile.skel    sh and make scripts for building GXemul.
+   demos                       Tutorial-like demos of testmachine functionality.
    doc                         Documentation.
    experiments                 Experimental code. (Usually not needed.)
    src                         Source code.
- To build the emulator, run the ./configure script, and then run make.
+ To build the emulator, run the configure script, and then run make. This
+ should work on most Unix-like systems.
- Building the emulator should work on most Unix-like systems. (One system which
- is specifically known to NOT work is Ultrix/RISC inside the emulator; Ultrix
- chokes on the configure script and the default cc in Ultrix doesn't work.)
  Regarding files in the src/include/ directory: only some of these are written
  by me, the rest are from other sources (such as NetBSD). The license text says
-Line 171 
 them like this is in order:
+Line 186 
 them like this is in order:
      This product includes software developed by Manuel Bouyer.
+     This product includes software developed by the Alice Group.
+     This product includes software developed by Ichiro FUKUHARA.
+     This product includes software developed by Marcus Comstedt.
  Also, src/include/alpha_rpb.h requires the following:
      Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 Carnegie-Mellon University.
-Line 187 
 Also, src/include/alpha_rpb.h requires t
+Line 208 
 Also, src/include/alpha_rpb.h requires t
  See individual files for license details, if you plan to redistribute GXemul
  or reuse code.
- Thanks to (in no specific order) Joachim Buss, Juli Mallett, Juan Romero
- Pardines, Alec Voropay, G�ran Weinholt, Alexander Yurchenko, and everyone
- else who has provided me with feedback.
  If you have found GXemul useful in some way, or feel like sending me comments
  or feedback in general, then mail me at anders(at)gavare.se.

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